Climate Change is something that isn’t being given as much attention to in the United States. Our group’s intention is to analyse the change in average temperature here, along with the change in CO2 emissions and try to find a correlation.
We will be using two data sets in our project, one for the average temperature seen in the US per year, along with CO2 emissions seen per country. We plan on filterng our the CO2 emissions for just data seen in the US for most of our analysis.
Our CO2_emissions file has information on the sources from which these CO2 emissions come from (ie residential buildings, manufacturing sites), so we will use our information_df.csv file to help us read the information in our CO2_emissions.csv. Our source for this information is the same source we used for CO2_emissions.csv, as hyperlinked in the above paragraph.
More specifically, the highest mean temperature seen from 1991 is 9.0308367. We expected that this would be seen in 2016 as our data consistently shows us that this has been the hottest year. The lowest mean temperature was 6.7306267, occuring in 1996. From this data too, we can conclude that temperature has been rising over the last 26 with a total rise in average of 7.6169996. This helps answer the first part of our second question – 2016 was the hottest year.
| Year | Total CO2 Emissions | Change in Temperature |
|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 7244272 | 7.713543 |
| 2005 | 7182808 | 7.931033 |
| 2007 | 7128952 | 7.879380 |
| 2006 | 6994087 | 7.971669 |
| 2003 | 6991255 | 7.729782 |
| 2002 | 6981787 | 7.794915 |
| 2000 | 6969124 | 7.496298 |
| 2001 | 6821236 | 7.633218 |
| 1999 | 6808138 | 7.286506 |
| 1998 | 6749016 | 8.097573 |
| 2010 | 6713349 | 7.591250 |
| 2008 | 6648991 | 6.990188 |
| 2009 | 6604069 | 7.167375 |
| 2011 | 6571654 | 7.548140 |
| 2012 | 6343841 | 8.173909 |
Our table above displays the yearly temperatures along with the CO2 emissions seen and the temperature in that year. This would help us in understanding and answering our question of if there is a correlation seen between emissions and temperature. Our table is sorted by total CO2 emissions, for ease in looking at the years with the worst CO2 emissions. Our data consists of the years 1998-2012. 2012, the most recent year, has the highest change in temperature with the least amount of total emissions. 2009, the year with the second least change in temperature is also the year with the 3rd least total emissions of CO2. This helps us in answering our first question – if there is a correlation between rise in average temperature and CO2 emissions. The linear regression is 0.1984574, so there doesn’t seem like there’s much of a correlation between the temperature change and total CO2 emissions seen per year, as the data from the table suggests. To answer the second question, our hottest year is not the year with the most CO2 emissions.